Energy-Efficient Virtual Radio Access Networks for Multi-Operators Cooperative Cellular Networks

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-1-2019

Abstract

5G networks will be characterized by massive densification of base stations (BSs). To minimize the network power consumption due to the increased BS deployment, we leverage emerging paradigms to propose BS energy-saving strategies applicable to 5G networks. We explore the potentials of virtualized radio access and core networks to enable spectrum sharing among mobile network operators (MNOs) by harnessing inter-band non-contiguous carrier aggregation. We propose the sleep-mode with efficient beamformers and spectrum-sharing (SEBS) strategy, which minimizes BS power consumption of cooperative MNOs. The licensed bandwidth of each MNO is partitioned into private and shared bands to provision active BSs with sufficient spectrum resources for serving all UEs. Moreover, an optimization problem is formulated to obtain the optimal intra- and inter-RAN beamforming vectors for efficient BS transmission power and improved user signal reception. Numerical simulations show that the proposed strategies yield significant reductions of total power consumption as compared to other schemes. We present different bandwidth sharing ratio formulations to motivate the cooperation among MNOs by the spectrum-user support trading. We also show that the trading does not always yield a higher spectral efficiency in the cooperative cellular network.

Identifier

85071289749 (Scopus)

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/TGCN.2019.2916368

e-ISSN

24732400

First Page

603

Last Page

614

Issue

3

Volume

3

Grant

1731675

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